Ed Atkins, © 2025.
Help is painfully funny, minutely observed and showers life with meaning again.
—Luke Kennard,
The Observer
Help
Steven Zultanski
Tenement Press / Yellowjacket 18
978-1-917304-04-7 / 160pp / £18.50.
Order direct from Tenement here.
(04.04.25)
A quartet of ‘semi-detached’
conversations from the poet.
Steven Zultanski doesn’t so much
risk the obvious as aspire to it, as the
Latin poets did.
—Robert Glück
Death-obsessed, disengaged and overinvested—the four long poems assembled in Steven Zultanski’s Help theatricalise morbid fascinations, self-protective impulses, and unfocused desire. Help is, at its core, a set of conversations; the result of games played between friends that were then transcribed, edited, and embellished. Participants were asked to talk about loss, the death of acquaintances, secret hiding places, mislaid time, and unmet demands. The resulting poems read like meandering scripts for unrealised plays; incidental excavations of persona and place.
In Help speech is pinned to the page and individual voices begin to appear as specimens. It is a catalogue of active disappointments, repeated anti-climaxes, and half-finished dissections. Someone demands endless love, but not from anyone in particular; someone squirms around in their chair, but for no communicable reason; someone hides in a shed, waiting to be found; someone sits in the ‘imagination room,’ and can think of nothing but biographical time. Help isolates these voices and dislocates them—flattens them—displaying them in a kind of vitrine. There’s no vitriol, no explication—but rather a thread of observations that veer toward fiction. These poems are a perpetuation of childish anxieties in the face of impossible need.
Somewhat reminiscent of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk (1968) or Alice Notley’s transcription poems of the 1970s, in Help the poet pretends to be a recording device, and the poem an act of remembering. Zultanski’s writing is at once skeletal and overstuffed, dryly unsentimental and yet dripping with melodrama. Help foregrounds its own contradictions in a collection that is at once both extremely personal and distinctly artificial.
A Description of a Book /
Zultanski on Zultanski
Care of The Kitchen (New York, NY) /
On Mind / and Montez Press Radio.
The following text was written for a joint book launch at Montez Press Radio, May 3rd 2024. My new book of poems, Help [published in the USA by Golias Books, 2024] was launched alongside new books by Marie Buck and Matt Walker [Spoilers, Golias Books, 2024], Emily Martin [My Salvation Lateral, The Elephants, 2024], and Jennifer Soong [Comeback Death, Krupskaya, 2024]. For reasons explained below, I decided not to read directly from the book and instead prepared this text. For publication in On Mind, I’ve lightly edited it, clarifying some ideas and rewriting certain lines that in retrospect struck me as too cheap, or attention-grabbing, or self-deprecating, or audience-pleasing.
—Steven Zultanski
* * *
It’s not entirely true, but I like to say that the four poems in Help were mostly built by setting up conversations and games between friends which I then transcribed, edited, and embellished. These conversations and games took place in domestic settings, where quiet intimacy provided a permissive context for the expression of feelings which are usually subject to mild repression and social correction, feelings that can be considered childish: morbidity, whininess, silliness, and detachment. Such emotions are often treated as antisocial in public or professional settings, but in my experience, they are inherent—and perhaps often foundational—to close friendships. Friends whine at each other. They giggle at bad jokes. Their voices rise in enthusiasm as they gossip about horrible things.
[...]
I wanted all of the poems in this book to put the reader in the position of the voyeur, though that’s never explicitly thematised. But one of the ways I think about Help is as a book for people who enjoy voyeurism (most people?). Another way I think about it is as a series of transcribed games—linguistic games, social games, power games. Another is as fictionalised performance documentation. Another is as a book of dance, not only because it involves representing bodies as moving or sitting or fidgeting, but because both the characters’ movements and their words are left unadorned by commentary, as open-ended as silent gestures.
[...]
For the full text
(care of The Kitchen),
see here.
* * *
Ralph Gibson, from
the ‘Days at Sea’ series,
circa 1974.
(Praise for Help.)
Brilliant, willfully obtuse, indeterminate, and excruciatingly voyeuristic, Help re-orchestrates and dissects the everydayness of our feelings, restaging them around spatulas, a glass of water, a group of friends eating breakfast and talking. Zultanski's proscriptive, quasi-improvised script deregulates our offhand affects and turns them into what they were all along: stage props in the mise en scenery of our lived lives.
—Tan Lin
Help is a completely unique and compellingly brilliant work. I was riveted by the strange theatre of discussion, the sociality of speech and the hilarious, macabre themes it naturally leads to. I wish there were more writers like Zultanski, writers playful and secure enough to so simply nudge existence into new terrain. Alas there are very few, so we have to grab rare works like this when they come around.
—Holly Pester
Help brilliantly extends Steven Zultanski’s current phase of writing—looser, more documentary, more situational. In setting up explicit objects of inquiry and conversation—love, death, childhood—the book shows that to know these things is to also know our friends and ourselves. Sustained by an orchestration of relation and memory (and thus reality), affect here is modular, the product of what happens when we transform things by talking about them. A careful and astute experiment in writing and living.
—Jennifer Soong
Steven Zultanski is the author of ten books, including Relief (Make Now, 2021), On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless (Information as Material, 2018), Honestly (Book*hug, 2018) and Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014). With the artist Ed Atkins, he co-wrote and co-directed Sorcerer, a theatrical project which has been realised as a play, a film, and a book (Prototype, 2023). Atkins and Zultanski’s new feature film, Nurses come and go, but for me, premiered at Tate Britain in 2025. He lives in Copenhagen.